Will Hattman

I spent the entire month of August in Iceland, and I think some of my clients didn’t even know it. If that’s not the ultimate testament to the practicality of remote work, it’s got to be pretty dang close.

A hill we pulled over to hike on the road to Vík.

Reason #1 I was able to do this was because my incredible wife Alissa was accepted to an artists’ residency program in Iceland, and this particular program allows spouses to tag along. Reason #2 is because my incredible job makes it possible for me to work from Iceland. So please count me a lucky guy for the record, and I guess the story can proceed from there.

Or: The Easier Your Website Makes It for People to Give You Money, the More Money They Will Give You

I’ll be honest with you: until recently, it had been a while since I’d had an experience in this line of work where a client carried out one of my recommendations and then reaped immediate and enormous success.

All of us in the agency SEO world have dealt with a client suffering from Rankings Monomania. The symptoms are always the same:

No matter how often you communicate, or by what means, they ask after their rankings in every exchange;

They’re usually laser-focused on how they’re ranking for one major keyword in particular, and usually for cosmetic reasons (in severe cases, this keyword will be a nightmarishly broad and competitive one, like “car insurance”);

They refract every strategic or tactical idea of yours through the lens of rankings, and in severe cases only buy in if specific rankings improvements are included among the expected gains in your pitch.

A maddening issue plagues the SEO community, a stone in our collective shoe that we keep trying to ignore, but that at least once a year rolls right back under the most sensitive part of our foot. We keep walking because the fast pace of the industry and the day-to-day needs of our clients make it so we don’t have time to stop, untie the laces, and pop the shoe off to shake the stone out. But sooner or later we’re going to have to, come what may.

This post started as a bit of a kiss-off to Bing. This is not to suggest that we at UpBuild have any beef with Microsoft’s eternal underdog of a search engine; while it’s unlikely to ever have the market share Google does, Bing can be a useful source of traffic, especially for specific niche markets, and it’s always best not to put all one’s eggs in Google’s basket. But since the founding of our fair company, there has been this one thing, this one feature of our standard SEO package that always required an undue sacrifice of time and effort almost exclusively for Bing’s sake, and during one of the industry discussions we had on our recent Team Day, we decided we weren’t going to take it anymore. [Read more…] about Why We’re Not Going to Write Inline Semantic Markup Anymore